A Novel Convolutional Neural Network Based Model for Recognition and Classification of Apple Leaf Diseases

Plants have a great role to play in biodiversity sustenance. These natural products not only push their demand for agricultural productivity, but also for the manufacturing of medical products, cosmetics and many more. Apple is one of the fruits that is known for its excellent nutritional properties and is therefore recommended for daily intake. However, due to various diseases in apple plants, farmers have to suffer from a huge loss. This not only causes severe effects on fruit’s health, but also decreases its overall productivity, quantity, and quality. A novel convolutional neural network (CNN) based model for recognition and classification of apple leaf diseases is proposed in this paper. The proposed model applies contrast stretching based pre-processing technique and fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm for the identification of plant diseases. These techniques help to improve the accuracy of CNN model even with lesser size of dataset. 400 image samples (200 healthy, 200 diseased) of apple leaves have been used to train and validate the performance of the proposed model. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 98%. To achieve this accuracy, it uses lesser data-set size as compared to other existing models, without compromising with the performance, which become possible due to use of contrast stretching pre-processing combined with FCM clustering algorithm.